Republicans claim they are unified (Jason Reed/Reuters)
The Hill:
GOP aides and lawmakers said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) decision to exit debt talks led by Vice President Biden was inevitable.
The timing of Cantor’s exit from the talks has been discussed for weeks, and senior House Republicans cast it as a natural progression for the negotiations.
This strikes me as a bit of revisionist history by Republicans. According to the article, Republicans claim that Boehner and Cantor were leading "a coordinated effort that was weeks in the making." But on Wednesday night, Boehner met privately with President Obama, offering no indication that Cantor was about to pull out of the discussions.
That means Boehner either withheld information from President Obama on Wednesday night, or he was blindsided by Cantor. The latter seems more plausible, especially in light of this:
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said Cantor consulted Boehner Thursday morning before announcing his decision to leave the talks, which puts those negotiations in limbo.
If the decision really were weeks in the making, Boehner would have already known about Cantor's withdrawal plans. Instead, he's saying he wasn't notified until Thursday morning.
I'm only speculating here, but it seems plausible Cantor had gotten wind of Boehner's meeting with Obama and decided to pull out of the negotiations because he feared that Boehner would undercut him.
If that, or anything like it, is what's going on here, we're witnessing a serious split in the GOP. They have obvious incentive to paper over their differences because if the GOP is divided, their leverage on the debt limit craters.
As things currently stand, Boehner will need 216 votes to raise the debt limit. There's 239 Republicans, and ten of them have already effectively ruled out voting to raise the limit. That means he can only lose thirteen more members of his caucus before he needs Democratic votes to raise the limit. Given the likelihood of that scenario, John Boehner is going to need Democratic votes to raise the debt limit, and that means he's going to need to find a way to compromise—and Eric Cantor doesn't appear interested in helping.